Persimmon Delay in Painting
oil, wax, acrylic on wooden panel
14 cm x 18 cm
I. A Painter Reading Physics
I am not a scientist.
I am a painter who, after a colleague sent me an article in ScienceDaily titled “Schrödinger’s Color Theory Finally Completed After 100 Years,” found myself drawn into research from Los Alamos National Laboratory exploring how human color perception unfolds within a curved geometric space. The work, led by Roxana Bujack, fulfills a vision first imagined by Erwin Schrödinger: that color is not merely sensation, not merely culture, but structure; that between black and white there runs a neutral axis; that between hues there exist distances that bend.
I do not pretend to enter their discipline.
But I recognize the terrain.
II. Curvature in the Hand
In this research, color is not plotted on a flat grid. It lives in curvature. It resists straight lines. The shortest passage between two colors is not necessarily direct.
This feels true in the studio.
Seeing does not move cleanly from eye to hand. It thickens. It hesitates. Some transitions flash across the body with immediacy; others must push through layers of memory, expectation, doubt. Perception feels suspended in a viscous medium.
I call this Optical Jelly — not as theory, but as sensation. A density between the world and the mark.
Science names curvature in equations.
I feel it as drag.
III. The Gap
We often imagine the interval between perception and action as time — a delay, however slight, between seeing and touching the surface. But what if the gap is not temporal, but spatial?
Let:
Delta s = internal perceptual path length.
Not a measurable unit. Not a claim about neurons. But a way of speaking about distance within the body — about how far an impression must travel before it becomes matter.
A mark is not instantaneous. It is the residue of traversal.
It carries the memory of the path it crossed.
IV. The Scintillation
There is a threshold in painting — a moment when perception ceases to hover and commits itself to form. I call this the Scintillation.
Physics offers a spare relation:
E = h * f
Energy equals Planck’s constant multiplied by frequency.
In the studio, the relation becomes a metaphor of urgency:
High-frequency perception becomes a high-intensity mark.
Low-frequency stabilization becomes a muted one.
When sensation vibrates rapidly — when attention is sharp, unstable, alive — the mark strikes with force. When perception settles, when it slows and organizes, the surface drifts toward neutrality.
The research at Los Alamos describes a neutral axis extending from black to white. In practice, I sense something similar: as intensity dissipates, color gravitates inward, toward quietness.
V. Decay
If perception moves through curvature, then effort accumulates. Distance has consequence. Intensity cannot remain constant as it travels.
Borrowing the contour of exponential decay, one might write:
E(Delta s) = E0 * e^(−lambda * Delta s)
Read gently: as internal distance increases, energy softens. Lambda becomes resistance — the thickness of one’s perceptual field. The viscosity of doubt. The friction of correction.
When a painting is overworked, Delta s grows large. Each revision lengthens the internal journey. The energy that once arrived swiftly must now traverse sediment. The surface cools. The mark drifts toward the neutral axis, toward equilibrium.
This is not neurology.
It is a description of fatigue.
Of how surfaces remember hesitation.
VI. Cézanne’s Tension
Paul Cézanne painted before computational models of color space, yet his paintings refuse to flatten into certainty. His apples tilt. His mountains breathe. His planes do not close.
There is curvature in his seeing.
It is as though perception itself remains slightly unsettled within the work — as though the eye has not completed its journey, and therefore neither has the world. He painted not the object resolved, but the act of resolving. Not the endpoint, but the traversal.
In this sense, his surfaces feel consistent with a curved perceptual space: distance active, tension sustained, neutrality resisted.
VII. Offset Geometries
The research from Los Alamos gives color a formal geometry. It measures curvature. It defines axes. It maps the field.
The studio does something else. It inhabits that field from within.
We share one external world, but no two of us occupy the same perceptual curvature. Each body bends experience differently. Each eye moves through its own density.
A painting is not a copy of the world.
It is a record of how the world traveled through one particular geometry.
The Los Alamos research approaches color perception from a scientific perspective, producing measurable, formal results that describe its curvature and structure. My studio practice, by contrast, traces the lived experience of perception — the resistance, intensity, and subtle shifts that occur as a mark travels from eye to hand. Neither is “more correct”; one reveals the geometry of perception mathematically, the other makes it visible materially. Together, they show that color is structured, curved, and non-linear, whether experienced or modeled.
If Roxana Bujack’s work reveals that color perception has intrinsic form, perhaps painting is one way that form becomes visible — not as diagram, not as proof, but as residue.
The mark does not explain the path.
It proves that passage occurred.
